LIE: Rest must be earned

Lie:      Rest must be earned.

Truth: Rest is given.

Do you:

• feel guilty when you relax?
• have trouble receiving unsolicited gifts?
• need to stay busy?

If you do, you may have imbibed this subtle lie: Rest must be earned. The truth is that our rest was so important that God built it into his world from the very beginning.

On the seventh day of creation, God established the Sabbath:

Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them, were finished. And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made. — Genesis 2:1–3

From the very beginning, even before Adam and Eve sinned in the garden, God structured time so that one day in seven was to be treated differently. It was ‘sanctified’ – set apart for God. This starting point established a rhythm to what life was to be.

Although this first Sabbath was the seventh day, it actually was man’s first full day of life. God created Adam at the end of the sixth day as his crowning masterpiece (Genesis 1:24–31). So that means that Adam began his life ‘on the Sabbath,’ that is, the first Sabbath. Apparently Adam spent his first day of life resting and enjoying perfect communion with God and his creation. No doubt it was a very full day of one marvel after another as he surveyed the completed provision of his divine tour guide. Can you imagine the confidence and adoration Adam had in God at the close of the seventh day, his first?

Maybe I’m assuming a bit here with my reverie of a divine tour, but surely God must have somehow ‘showed him around’ the earth. But the fact is that Adam began his life on the seventh, the sanctified day. His life began from a position of rest and enjoyment of the very good work of God. But why is this significant and what does it teach us about rest and work?

It teaches us that, rightly understood, our work is to participate with God in the work that he has already begun and that is now on-going. Our work is informed, supported and provisioned by a huge amount of infrastructure – both physical and spiritual – that cannot be fathomed. We were never meant to create an independent world with our own timetable; rather, God planned for us to participate directly with him in his world and on his time schedule. We see this in the creation story when God placed Adam in the Garden of Eden.

The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there He put the man whom He had formed. . . . to tend and keep it. — Genesis 2:8, 15b

God had already planted the garden before Adam arrived. He led him there to ‘tend and keep it.’ This would be Adam’s work.

But this direct participation with God in his work ended when he banished Adam from the garden: “the Lord God sent him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken.” (Gen 3:23) Adam and Eve had eaten the forbidden fruit, meaning that they had determined to know how to live independently from God. They had had the opportunity to work with God forever in his kingdom but chose instead to create their own. Now Adam had to start from scratch, tilling the bare earth himself, the ground from which he himself had come, and to which he would now return in death — an allusion to living his life while digging his own grave.

So Adam had now reversed the God-ordained rest-work sequence. Instead of starting from a position of rest, confident of God’s full provision, and then working with God in that, now Adam must work ‘in the sweat of [his] face,’ and then by necessity collapse from exhaustion. Actually the entire never-ending, exponential-curved growth in life that God had designed for Adam and Eve got reversed and now life became a decelerating, exhausting decline into an inevitable death.

Back now to the lie: ‘Rest must be earned.’ The deception here is the assumption that nothing of value can exist without man’s effort. But that’s just not true; it never was. Jesus re-envisioned the Kingdom’s garden of God:

Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature? So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? — Matthew 6: 25–30

Most of the riches that we enjoy every day are freely given to us by God: the air we breathe, our growth and health, our vision, hearing, tasting, smelling, touch, time itself, sex, speech, sleep and on it goes. We must work for our food but Jesus taught us to pray for our daily bread and not to worry over it. The profusion of natural resources is so abundant that only the lazy are warned. And unless we see the full and abundant provision of our heavenly Father, and content ourselves in him, we will likely fall into four false motivations for work — all of them assuming this reversal of life, that Adam and Eve fell into.

1  Work as debt/enslavement. In this work we fall into the trap of working from obligation. Usually someone or some system has intimidated us into believing that we owe labor to them. Either through coercion or guilt or pay we feel we must work. In one sense this is the reality of our present condition. But in a higher sense we are commanded to work ‘as unto the Lord,’ and not unto man.

Yes, God did curse Adam and told him that he must work ‘by the sweat of his brow,’ but Jesus bore and broke the curse of Adam. By the Spirit it is now possible to live and work without the curse. However, that doesn’t mean that we become irresponsible and can mooch off of others. But it does mean we can learn to live in an increasing reliance upon God as our source. Life in the kingdom re-enables us to work from a position of rest and peace in God’s full provision. See the Lie: Relying completely on God is impossible, naïve, and impractical.

2  Work as equity/competition. In this we’re motivated by comparing ourselves, by greed, by materialistic gain. We cannot rest until we have a bigger house, car or wardrobe, or at least as big as ‘the Joneses.’

3  Work as a means to acceptance. In this work we try to please, to be accepted, even demeaning ourselves to the level of a slave.

4  Work as justification. In this work we seek to assuage our guilt, working until we’ve done what we think is enough to justify ourselves and thereby gain the right to do what we want. We may say, “I’ve worked hard today so now I can party!”

All of these motivations and combinations of them assume no provision from God is freely available; they all assume that we must work for our own salvation and that there is nothing free in life. But nothing could be further from the truth.

If we don’t know the fullness of God’s provision we really have no other choice but to believe this lie – we would out of necessity (or so we think) have to take matters into our own hands.

But like a newborn baby, helpless and dependent on his mother, so we too must understand our own helplessness and dependency in the world that we’re born into. Then, just as that baby grows and eventually takes part in her parents’ work, first in small and feeble ways, but growing more able as she is exercised in it, so we too grow to participate more and more in God’s wide and wonderful Kingdom.

So what can we do then to reverse the work-to-rest cycle? Here are some practical things to consider:

1  Start your day with a ‘quiet time.’ It’s now nearly a lost art, but the old saints knew its value. Carve out a time – even if it’s only five to ten minutes – before starting your day to get alone in a quiet spot, open the Bible, read a passage meditatively and pray by thanking God for his goodness and grace. This orients us, establishes a ‘true north’ for our day – the Lord is in charge and he is able to give us everything we need.

2  Listen first. ‘Be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath.’ Stephen Covey said it well: ‘Seek first to understand, then to be understood.’

3  Rest in the silence and solitude before you pray. One of the most difficult things to do is to just be – soaking up the goodness and grace of God. Blaise Pascal said:

All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

4  Receive the free grace of God. If you haven’t yet received the grace of God (or are not sure you have), look with the eye of faith to Jesus and his sacrifice on the cross. He did that for us – without us having to do anything at all. This is our salvation. He is our salvation.

Let it sink in deeply: he accepts as we are, without us doing anything. And then:

We love Him because He first loved us. — I John 4:19

See also: Lie: I can never do enough

See also the introduction to this category: Lies attacking ‘the good life.’